Antwan HorfeeFrance

ANTWAN HORFEE combines paintings in various formats with a series of drawings. While he refrains from the use of oil paints and aerosols in his paintings and focuses entirely on eco-friendly acrylic paints, his drawings are created by using only black gouache and graphite on paper.

Landscapes form the focal point of his paintings, which both the artist and the viewer encounter as if through the lens of a camera. Unlike his drawings, however, which tend to depict the concrete, these landscapes are not formulated or geographically situated, but—as a homage to fantasy films and video games—are taken from a fantastic non-reality. The attribution of colors and forms to concrete objects is always attempted but is never quite fully successful.

Horfees paintings are densely packed with scenic and symbolic motives.
The Paris-based artist creates artworks of high tension by combining dynamic and colorful elements within intricate compositions. While he seeks pure abstraction in some artworks, others have figurative allusions.
Formerly working in the streets, he needed to complete his illicit works quickly. Horfee’s technique today combines his early skills – using a spray can at fast pace – with a classical approach to painting and sculpture.

As a result, his work is marked by dynamic spontaneity and technique of the established.The central design element here is light, which is deftly deployed by Horfee, not only to give his works an impression of three-dimensionality, but also to create an illusionary spectacle that potentially takes place outside the pictorial space—the monster that cannot yet be seen, but whose presence is certainly felt.
The effect is not one of surprise, but of Hitchcockian suspense.